Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories

Confessions Of A Falling Woman

If this letter reaches you, it will have to be by some divine accident. I know you are no longer living at this address, and the phone company no longer lists you in Chicago. That doesn't surprise me; after all I was the one who loved cities, not you. All your talk, after the accident, about going back to Minot, working on your dad's farm, how you wanted to sleep in the dark again. Anyplace but North Dakota, I used to think. It might please you to know that I've come around to your way of thinking, Russ. Not geographically, but I have a small garden. A few tomato plants, some basil and mint, a row of spinach. It's not ambitious, but things grow in it.

In fact, I took a shot and called Information in Minot. I also tried to get in touch with you through Audie, and I'm sorry to hear of his passing. He was a sweet man, and he treated me like a daughter, even after the divorce.

So my only hope, absurd perhaps, is that you've left a forwarding address and the postal service will find you for me.

You must be wondering why I am trying to contact you now, after all this time. Perhaps it will strike you as a thoughtless invasion of your privacy, or worse, a deliberate unkindness, an attempt to open up old wounds.

Another possibility occurs to me: that you have put our life behind you entirely, and I will have to rely on idle curiosity. I'm trying to imagine you now, wherever you are, holding this letter in your hands and glancing over the lines, like a plea from some charity. What does she want from me?

Here it is: I want you to hear me out. An apology is a limp thing, I know that, and it's late by about eleven years, but here it is.

Do you remember the night in the hospital, we were in the waiting room, and you said you had noticed the tires on the Chevy the week before, that they were a little bald? It was just something you muttered, you probably don't remember. You were saying a lot of things, and your hair was coming out in handfuls, little tufts of hair coming off in my hands when I stroked your head. The medic said it was shock. Still, you might have noticed that I didn't shush you, that I didn't say "No, honey, it's not your fault."

The brakes had locked, and I realize now that new tires wouldn't have made any difference. But at the time, I heard an explanation in your words. Our child couldn't die unless someone had been irresponsible, I thought, unless someone was to blame. I don't remember much else of that year, except being tired. It took so much effort to keep that image of balding tires at bay, to keep on loving you, to keep silent when I wanted to scream. Listening to you talk about moving to Minot, as if the city were at fault. And then when you came home from work with the name of a counselor, a grief counselor, as though we required instruction on grieving. You said we had to come to terms with Megan's death before we could go on. What you didn't know, of course, was that I had already found a way. God knows, I didn't want to blame you, but the alternative was unthinkable, random horror. Forget what I told you when I left, that you didn't meet my needs, that I needed my space, or whatever was the current jargon. I traded you in for the illusion that the world still made sense.

I didn't know it then, that you can let go and still live. There's a story I heard recently, a parable about a man who falls off a cliff. As he's falling he grabs onto a branch or a root sticking out from the cliff. He hangs on for dear life, clutching that thin twig, but he's not strong enough and his grip is slipping, and finally his fingers slip loose. And he falls… six inches. I clung to that image of balding tires for almost a decade. For what it's worth, I want you to know that I've finally let go.

About seven months ago, I was pushing a cart down the cereal aisle at the Grand Union. (You may have noticed the postmark; I bought a small house in Croton a few years ago.

It's an hour to New York, the best of both worlds.) You know how they play Muzak in the supermarkets? I was pushing the cart, and this song exploded in my head, very loud. It was Tina Turner singing "What's Love Got to Do with It?" Except it was inside my head, like picking up a radio station in a gold filling. I just stood there, terrified, gripping the handle of the cart, listening to Tina blaring in my brain. And then it stopped, she clicked off. I looked around to see if anyone else had heard it. A woman in a pink sweat suit picked a box of All-Bran off a shelf and glanced over the print on the side of the carton.

That was the first time; it happened again. Of course, I didn't tell anyone, not even the man I'm seeing. Peter is a good man, and he has since surprised me with his reserve of humor, but our relationship was not yet intimate enough to admit insanity. You see, I also smelled burning rubber sometimes. That was what made me think it was a sign: the stench of tires burning. At the time, I was sure that God or my psyche was trying to tell me something. Something to do with Megan or with you.

I made a list of the songs and the times when I had heard them. The rush-hour train home, between Dobbs Ferry and Tarrytown: Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. While taking my dinner out of the microwave: Dean Martin singing "White Christmas." In the shower: "Something's Coming," from West Side Story. I bought the tapes and listened to them at night, over and over again, trying to decode their meaning. Tina Turner was telling me that love was a secondhand emotion, but Dean Martin suggested that the memory of family and home are the things that sustain you through loneliness. Maybe the message had something to do with treetops glistening, a pastoral scene, but that discounted West Side Story. "Something's coming, something good." I tried anagrams. Finally, I went to an analyst for help. He sent me to an MD, who sent me to a specialist. As it turns out, I have a brain tumor.

I've been told that as a tumor grows it presses against the brain tissue and sometimes things misfire. The songs I heard were random bytes lodged in my brain, not even favorite songs. The smell of burning rubber is a common symptom, by the way, if I had known what I was looking for. Perfectly logical, but there is no meaning attached to any of it.

Are you still with me, Russ?

There's no logic to a brain tumor, to a car spinning out on a few wet leaves. It doesn't make sense to die. Not at five, not at forty-three or -four, not even, I suppose, at ninety. It's very hard not to take it personally. Not to think God's out to get me, to punish me for something. But for what, Russ? Living?

And everything else that has happened to me – you, Megan, Peter, my entire life – it doesn't form some grand pattern. Not one that I can recognize, anyway. It seems so ridiculous now that I could have blamed you for Meggie, for our unhappiness afterward. There is no one to blame this time around. I can't tell you what a relief that is, finally.

I don't hear music anymore. They removed the tumor, although there are still bad cells brewing in there, despite a first round of chemo. I suppose the odds are against me, but then I don't believe in odds anymore. I believe it could just as easily go my way as not.

You should see me, Russ. I'm learning to do quite stylish things with scarves. I look at my face in the mirror and don't recognize it; however, I do look vaguely like Georgia O'Keeffe, which pleases me. My eyes look stronger than they did when I was well, and the bones in my face have come out like a landscape. All the fat has been carved away. Please don't misunderstand me here. I'm not reappearing in your life with any ulterior motives. I expect and hope that you have remarried; I can't imagine you alone. And to be honest, I can't afford a regret that huge. It seems like a form of suicide to regret any part of my life, even the mistakes, and suicide, at this stage of the game, seems like gilding the lily. Redundant, anyway. Still, I imagine different sequences. It's like a parlor game. I back up a few moves and try to see how else I might have played this, what other lives were open to me. I imagine the possibilities, the maze of random choices. And I always come back to you. It doesn't change a thing, but I think it's important to say.

I never told you this, in the morning it had seemed too silly to talk about. Remember that first summer after Megan was born, when we went out to North Dakota to show Audie his new granddaughter? There was a night I couldn't sleep.

The bed in your old room was too narrow for both of us. So I sneaked downstairs, threw your coat on over my nightgown and went outside. I started walking down the road from the house out toward the main road. There was no moon, no neighboring lights, nothing but an icy dust of stars from one edge of the earth to the other. At some point, I saw a slow beam of headlights in the distance, tracing a line across the dark, as straight and steady as a satellite. I walked toward it for what must have been a long time, although neither of us seemed to change position.

I had no sense of how far I'd gone, until after I turned around and started to head back. The sodium vapor light on the side of Audie's barn glowed like a firefly. I suddenly felt dizzy – the enormity of black space, the emptiness of the planet. You and our daughter slept inside that tiny light, and our three lives seemed in that moment so tenuously connected, like a miraculous accident of crossed paths. I was too frightened to sleep when I returned. I felt like someone who had been visited by angels, struck dumb by the sight of terrifying beauty. You said the next morning I looked haunted, and I told you I'd had bad dreams.

You see why I couldn't go back there after she died.

What I keep coming back to, Russ, is that you and Megan were a mystery in my life. I expected to marry a businessman, my father more or less, to raise two anonymous children, to vacation in Europe once or twice, to live out my days unsurprised. God knows, I never suspected I would care for a man who was afraid to fly, who liked canned peas and couldn't be trusted not to say whatever came into his head. I never imagined I would be wrenched with love for a child who had your temper, my crooked teeth, and a laugh that neither of us had ever heard before. Where did that laugh come from? Even if Megan had lived, she would have remained a mystery. Even if I had stayed, I would never have been able to explain the fact of you in my life. Just pure dumb luck.

I feel inexplicably lucky. Against all reason, I believe that I can send these words out into the night and they will find you. You needn't write back. If you hear me, that's more than enough.